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Hamlet The Royal Shakespeare Company Stratford-upon-Avon ***** Is Hamlet a one-player event? Or is equally, for instance, Lear, Macbeth, King John? Of course, in each such case, not. John (like Lear) has a Bastard, a boy Prince (Arthur, whose dispossession of his rightful throne makes John a kind of proto-Richard III), and his constant mother Constance. Macbeth is riddled with Thanes (lairds): MacDuff, Banquo and the rest, and likewise a former boy prince, now youngish heir, Malcolm, who does succeed - and becomes Scotland's greatest king, Malcolm III ('Canmore' - 'great chief', 1058 to 1093). Despite the prominence on the blasted heath of its mad ex-king, Lear is riddled with villainous rivals and the innocent (Gloucester as well as Cordelia), with the Fool, and with a Hamletish brutalised ending. And Hamlet certainly does field another 'player': the 'Player King' (one of three roles played, in the invariably resplendent Rupert Goold's latest RSC staging, by Anton Lesser, no less (also the Ghost, but actually best-directed as the grave-digger, and skull-supplier). The Players' scene, despite some fascinating white-clad, mask-faced, indeed ghoulish assailants which made a dazzlingly dramatic diversion in itself, was pretty messy, for the ear-tincture-poisoning of 'Gonzago' (viz. Hamlet père) - so essential to justify Claudius' (here near-inexplicable) outburst - seemed little short of a non-event.
Jared Harris as Claudius Again, too much, the hyperactive, doth occlude the kernel. But by making Lesser - acting the battlement- (here deckboard-) bestriding dead father - also play the play's regal murderer - was a masterstroke. You had only to see this excitable Hamlet's eyes on stalks as he beholds not just the bloodthirsty shadow play he has provocatively contrived, but finds himself - unwittingly for once - staring into the very eyes of his dead father's Ghost. Well, this Hamlet was an interpretation absolutely to die for. In every way, in every respect. In every grimace, every gesture, every grievance or grieving. The golden boy denied (like Arthur, or Richard's Edward) his birthright, who hence alienates and isolates himself from, indeed rejects, reality. Goes mad, or seems to, or wishes to seem to. Who cocks things up so that he himself, like his vulturous enemies, dies. Or perhaps rather, effects his own suicide (much contemplated) but brings the whole Curtain (Arras?) down with him. The poison and the envenomed rapiers and the cut-throat throat-cut usurper were inevitably one of the highlights, Shakespeare's unremitting climax, though possibly also weaknesses, of this action-over-packed, Titanic voyage. This wondrous Hamlet's name? Luke Thallon. In some ways a newcomer, certainly an RSC newcomer ('debut'); though not entirely an unknown. After his Guildhall (GSMD) training, Goold, for instance, had picked Thallon up (cast him) at the Almeida, twice; and Stephen Daldry in the gay (Nazi) masterpiece Bent at the RNT: a doomed and savaged, self-excruciating role that feels a bit like a dry run for Hamlet. Hamlet as a one-man show? One can scarcely deny Larry (Olivier) his black and white electrification of the role in 1948. Branagh's film (with his extraordinary role reversal, casting himself as the Prince and Derek Jacobi - the BBC's superb former Hamlet himself - as ('I') Claudius), stands out, even 30 years on, as one of the best (Kate Winslet, Ken Dodd) amid a nest of Hamlets on celluloid. It could be said the finest of all - alongside this fledgling yet marvellously inventive, prematurely mature Luke Thallon - was Innokenty Smotkunevsky's staggering interpretation in Russian director Grigori Kozintsev's 1964 masterpiece, hailed by Olivier himself. Newcomers taking huge roles at Stratford is by no means new. Henry V set Alan Howard on a (near-)famous path in 1970 - with Christopher Gable as his Laertes (though surely better suited temperamentally to Horatio), and Helen Mirren as Ophelia. Having a good portrayal of Horatio, Hamlet's one meaningful loyal friend right from the start, the opening scene on the (here, kind of) castle walls, is important, and should be, valuable.
Nia Towle as Ophelia Kel Matsena, the Horatio here (that name sort of implies loyalty, doesn't it? [Horatius defended the bridge across the Tiber against the marauding Etruscans] was one of several characters in Goold's slightly up-and-down (true, splendid in so many ways) production who (Matsena) made a more than decent job of a not always rewarding role - swimming amid a mixture of very cunning, tight-planned, shrewd management and bits of more ropy, in-betweenish direction (the 'ideas' often worked brilliantly, yet Goold's invention and his Designer, Es Devlin's and Costumier Evie Gurney's dressing of the sea-sickening set were not consistently beneficial.). In his (very) early autobiography - Chatto & Windus 1989: a great read - Branagh, aged 29, describes his fledgling experience at RADA, its massive value, and goes on to say how, when he craved to act at the RSC and was asked "In what role?" he whispered "Henry V?" - and got the part (Stratford, 1984). There have probably been a fair number of rapidly applauded young arrivistes here by the Avon, but there's no doubt that Luke Thallon (b. 1996, so by strange chance now exactly the same age as Branagh's 29) is one who is going to be with us for a long time. I could exhaust myself and the reader by even beginning to outline the merits of this astounding young actor, striking in itself as he lopes about in a greatcoat straight out of Waiting for Godot, or the one moment his bared chest is - partly - exposed, long after he has been spattered all over with Elliot Levey's very crimson old codger's blood. Levey makes a very fine, never overplayed, avuncular/paternal, though of course garrulous figure ("Neither a borrower nor a lender be..."). This was much more a kindly than a fussy Polonius, who doesn't deserve his sticky end (he's shot, not knifed, down a ship's ladder; quite how Hamlet, let alone Gertrude, manage to emerge so dramatically bespattered is not clear - one of those many corners in this absorbing production which - despite the admirable overall thrust - just doesn't quite pull off. Gertrude is one of those issues herself. Nancy Carroll is reduced to a kind of yes-man (or woman): she has little personality; no significant association with any other character than Claudius (apart from, curiously, Lewis Shepherd's slightly sub fusc then ultimately short-fuse Laertes. The poisoned cup finale - just a quick, snappy intervention by a mortified Claudius trying to stop her (actually it augurs his own impending end) was - well, like some of the finale, OK. For Hamlet's scene with his mother - a kind of inverted tryst - we're still on board a heaving ship (good for The Tempest: Goold directed Patrick Stewart as Prospero at the RSC as long ago as 2006) - as we've been throughout the rolling and rocking show. Scarcely a boudoir. This - 'a life on the ocean wave' - was indeed the 'big idea' which proved essentially a 'not so big' idea; yet it did make for some ingenuity, creativity and freshness, and gave Goold and his Movement Director Hannes Langolf plenty of opportunities for some eye-watering, dazzling, even exciting, blocking, not all entirely necessary: a sort of sudden infusion of Delacroix. Still, the mother-son exchange worked primarily because of the gobsmacking variety of Thallon's reactions, predictability-cum-unpredictability, affrontedness, versus acute vulnerability. Indeed one of the most memorable moments in the whole play was where Thallon kneels, utterly-small-child-like, in between his mother's legs (return to the womb?) and lays his head on her knees. (O dearest, once-beloved mother, if only it could have been different, and not like this?) Yet conversely, we are shattered by his capacity for the very opposite: Thallon can be as brutal as he is yearning: "Nay, but to live In the rank sweat of an enseaméd bed [meaning, surely, semen - where he, the baby, was once inseminated'], / Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty". But the madness, or feigned madness, which dominates the second half (the gut-wrenchingly ravishing Yorick scene apart, another Thallon masterpiece) really takes over here. Everything henceforth is disconcerting, disaffiliating, decoupling, disrupting, deranging; desperate. Jared Harris's opening as Claudius was not the strongest one could visualise. Early on, he seemed a bit limp, even insignificant, as he disports his crown nicked from his brother (and nephew) a mere two months or so earlier, and a varied array of crimson finery. He manipulates, but gently. One of his best scenes is when he is toying with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, ludicrously gullible and played by Chase Brown and Tadeo Martinez (and Goold) as a pair of lanky doltish twins, like something out of Gogol. Tom Stoppard, of course, saw the ironies and absurdity and possibilities. The fact that these two old 'schoolchums' will end up being bumped off themselves (instead of Hamlet, following their brief) is always something of a hoot.
Nancy Carroll as Gertrude Was this famously ill-fated boat trip the source of the whole wheeze of playing all this Hamlet - sometimes, to be honest, very effectively, sometimes pretty redundantly - aboard a bridgeless, portholeless, largely capstanless plonker of a cargo ship. A blast from the hooter (James Stretton on one of his five brass instruments) was - well, at least authentic. But this Claudius grew as we progressed. His early pseudo-affability rings thin; his long, dangerously embittered trying-to-keep-the-boat-afloat exchange with Lewis Shepherd's irascible Laertes was forcible; but Harris's agony of self-castigation and bursting forth of guilt towards the close (like Macbeth appalled at the implications of his planned murder) was - one must concede - most impressive: a high point. in fact. You really did feel he wished he longed to undo it all and put the clock back. Ophelia? Nia Towle was gentle, charming, touchingly expressive, to a point. After her (?self)-drowning, another of the most moving lines falls again to Carroll's Gertrude: "I hop'd thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife (as rightful King and Queen?) . . . And not have strew'd thy grave." Yet rightly or wrongly, I found the Ophelia story underplayed, rather fragmentary (partly Shakespeare, true), thinly plotted, almost as if cut (there were plenty such in this version, which certainly kept it moving). Her little ditty was strikingly unmemorable - no Feste, or lament for Imogen, here: unlike so much else of Lindsey Miller's sometimes lulling, intermittently storm-tossed, frequently deeply affecting, apt, well-judged music: surely one of the distinct bonuses of this staging. But one wanted more from Ophelia's rosemary and fennel and columbines. "They withered all when my father died." It is (rightly) Polonius' death as much as Hamlet's indifference that has turned her. Gertrude's "There is a willow grows aslant a brook" all but disappeared. I promised not to rant on or coo about how awesome, extraordinary, how truly incredible and miraculous Luke Thallon revealed himself in this, as in doubtless other productions, past and future. It did no harm that he is, frankly, beautiful. It helped the peerless range with which Thallon's take on the Dane alternates the exquisite with the bitter, the sane with the dislocated, the shy with the aggressive, the wavering with the resolute, the shrewd with the naive, the blond bombshell with the terrified kitten, the destructive with the self-obliterating. One of the most strikingly intelligent of all the boating weather imaginings, indeed the most arresting image of all these not exactly bon voyage visuals, hit me at the very end. The vast back-reaching vessel, multi-angled at anything from 20% to 35% (maybe more), constantly perilous, not quite upturning but shaking scarily during the devised storm-scenes, finally - for the first time - settles down on the level. At last, a calming of choppy waters. Everything is solved; all the hatreds salved. If that's what was intended - and surely it was - it was ingenious. Thallon's solo offering could well define a generation, and an era, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Quite some feat. Not to be missed. To 29-03-25. Roderic Dunnett 20-02-25 |
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